Tracy Hazzard breaks down when to use native captions versus SRT files. Use SRT files for edited captions on YouTube. Native in-app captioning only makes sense for videos under 30 seconds or if you have 10,000+ followers, since the platform boost is less than 10%. Prioritize consistent posting over manual captioning.
Questions this video answers
About 10,000 followers (10k) or more.
Less than 10% boost.
A text (sidecar) caption file that includes timestamps so captions sync to video; can be exported from video-editing tools.
Chapters
Captioning and subtitles on videos and social media posts are kind of controversial. It's a big decision about whether or not you want to pre caption them, make it easy on yourself and load them in with the captions already a part of it. Use some of your video editing tools, or in our case here at Pottiti, we use production, our production team puts them in it automatically. But here's the thing, it's controversial because sometimes you get a boost from the social media platform or from YouTube by using the captioning tools that are native to the app. So native to YouTube, native to Instagram, native to Facebook, native to TikTok, right? Thinking about it from this ways now, it's not a big, big problem. If you've got like a 30 second, 15 second video and you want to do the captioning, it's fairly easy for you to do that yourself. But if you've got a long form video, like something that you might be putting into YouTube, that's a lot of work to do the captioning. So do you want to use some auto captioning tools, some tools that are out there? Use our production team in case of potatoes, right? Do all of that, but still get the benefit of being able to have that happen in YouTube. One of the ways you can do this is what with what we call an srt file. It is a text file, but it has the timestamps already in it, so it knows exactly when to start and stop the caption and it's synced to the video. So when we edit a video in, and you can do this in almost any video editing tool, you can usually export an srt file. So you don't save the file with the captions already on it. You save a separate SRT file, you load up the video into YouTube, you load up the SRT file and now they're already synced, but they're already edited. That can be really useful if you're using any kind of editing tool that or an AI tool maybe that is already cleaning up the captions for you, fixing typos, fixing statements, taking out ums and ahs, and all the weird little things that you might have in there, this is a great way to do that. So if you can still use the native tool, still use the captioning system that is in YouTube already and use an srt file. So this is one great way. I do highly recommend doing that on YouTube, whether or not you have a large following. But here's my rule, my guideline that I Give to all my clients at Potter Ties. If you do not have a large enough following on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or anywhere else in this and it's not a short video, so if it's not 15 seconds, 30 seconds, really easy for you to do yourself, if it's a longer video, then don't do the native captioning in it. It's not going to be worth it because unless you have a hundred thousand followers, the boost of it isn't going to be worth it. So my guideline is if you don't have 10,000 followers or more on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or anywhere, then it's not worth the the boost that you would get for the lower followership to use the native tools. That being said, if your mission and your everyday thing that you're working on and doing is growing your Instagram follow following, growing your TikTok following, then absolutely use the native tools. But if you're just kind of like cruising and you don't care, if you get a hundred new followers every month and you're just kind of cruising on that and it's not really your primary job, then don't use the native tools. The boost is less than 10%. So if you had a hundred followers, you'd get 10, right? You get 10 more that would potentially see it. That's not enough to make it worth my time. I start doing 10,000 now, I have a lot more followers, I'm going to get a bigger boost, it's going to get a better circulation and it is going to make a difference and help me. It will be worth my time to edit those and use the captioning tools within the native apps because many of those other apps don't use SRT files. So you can do it. You have to copy, paste, edit time it, scroll it. Like it's just not easy to do. And so it will take you a lot more time to post up content. I'd rather have you posting consistently and constantly than get into this conundrum of is it worth my time or I'm not posting because I don't have enough time to edit the captions right now. Go ahead and post anyway. Unless you have a large following and it's going to make a difference. And if you have a large following, you likely have a social media team. And if you have a social media team, make them use the native tools. It's going to get you a boost. So thinking about it this way, use the native tools whenever it's time or there's a really easy way to do it, like an SRT file, or if you have a large following. So if you have the time, or you're investing the time because you want to get a larger following and you want to really boost your followership on that platform, use the native tools. The more native tools you use, the better off it is. The more sound, the more captioning. The more of all those things you use, the better off you're going to be, because they're going to give you a boost for using their stuff. So think about it that way and make your decisions. And make sure that if you're with Potter Ties, you tell us what you want, we're happy to export an SRT file for you, we're happy to not put your captions on your social media posts. We're happy to give it to you whatever way is the most useful for you.
